Summary
Blaise Pascal was a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. Just another run of the mill renaissance man. Pensées, or ‘Thoughts’ are a collection of loosely collected writings put together posthumously. What starts as a series of somewhat disconnected thoughts ends in a fairly coherent apologetic for faith in general and Christian faith in particular.
Thoughts
I did not research this book before reading it. I saw this quote:
The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of…
Which intrigued me and so finding that the quote came from this book I put it on my list. This book also contains the fairly well-known Pascal’s Wager, which in case you hadn’t heard was a thought experiment positing the idea that when facing the choice to believe in God you should take into account what there is to be lost vs what there is to be won. In short if you don’t believe in God and he doesn’t exist, you don’t lose or gain anything substantial. On the other if you don’t believe in God and he does exist, you stand to lose quite a bit. Conversely, if you believe in God and he doesn’t exist, you’ve lost nothing substantial, but if you believe in God and he does exist you stand to gain quite a bit. I was not in the mood for apologetics but found some of his ideas interesting and can definitely see how influential he has been in apologetics since. I much more enjoyed the early sections of the book where he picked on my home boy Montaigne and humans in general:
Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart. If all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.
But the main event, the thing that drew me to the book was his rejection of rationality:
Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.
The philosophical divide has always pitted rationalists (truth by reason) against empiricists (truth by experience). Pascal rejected or rather subjected those truth-seeking strategies to a third and what he considered ‘higher’ strategy, that is faith. He makes the argument that at the bottom of all axioms is a leap of faith, so instead of trying to cloak this leap we should acknowledge it and try to use our ’leaps’ wisely. He gives several criteria for comparing various leaps to each other to help evaluate what is ultimately a leap into uncertainty. As one of the fathers of probabilistic mathematics it is no surprise that he was the one to come up with ’the wager’. Overall, there were quite a few interesting lines of thoughts that I enjoyed, but I would not strongly recommend the latter half unless you have an interest in historical Christian apologetics.